Chicago’s historic Fine Arts Building and Studebaker Theater are excited to announce the return of Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol to the Studebaker for a limited run this holiday season, December 12–28, 2025.
Featuring hundreds of handmade puppets, immersive sound design and a stunning live score, Manual Cinema's Christmas Carol is a holiday show unlike any other. The beloved one-of-a-kind rendition of Charles Dickens’ classic story is co-produced by the Studebaker Theater and Manual Cinema.
Tickets for Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol go on sale October 1 and start at $45, with student discounts available with proof of ID. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit fineartsbuilding.com/christmascarol.
Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol at Studebaker Theater, images by Jenn Udoni / Franco Images
In Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol, avowed holiday skeptic Aunt Trudy has been reluctantly recruited to carry on her late husband Joe’s tradition of spreading Christmas cheer. Alone in her Chicago home on Christmas Eve, she reconstructs his annual Christmas Carol puppet show over a Zoom call, while the family celebrates from afar. But as Trudy dives deeper into the story, the puppets take on a life of their own and the family call transforms into a breathtaking, one-of-a-kind cinematic reimagining of Dickens’s classic ghost story.
“We are delighted to welcome Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol back to the Studebaker,” says Jacob Harvey, Managing Artistic Director of the Fine Arts Building and Studebaker Theater. “Manual Cinema’s imaginative and multidisciplinary adaptation has become the perfect holiday tradition for the Fine Arts Building, which has been Chicago's cultural hub for 127 years. This Christmas Carol is a truly magical experience and we look forward to sharing it with audiences of all ages!”
Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol is adapted from the novel by Charles Dickens and devised by Manual Cinema, with additional writing by Nate Marshall. Storyboards and puppet design are by Drew Dir, with original score and sound design by Ben Kauffman and Kyle Vegter, and lighting design by Trey Brazeal.
"We're so excited to be returning to the Studebaker Theater with Manual Cinema's Christmas Carol and continuing this new Chicago holiday tradition!” says Drew Dir, Co-Artistic Director of Manual Cinema. “As Manual Cinema celebrates its fifteenth year making interdisciplinary puppetry, theater, and music, we're thrilled to share our genre-bending take on Charles Dickens's classic ghost story with Chicago audiences once more."
The Fine Arts Building is a home for art in all forms: from pioneers like Poetry magazine’s founding publisher Harriet Monroe, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz illustrator W. W. Denslow, sculptor Lorado Taft and the Chicago Little Theatre, to the ongoing legacies of painters, musicians, booksellers, puppeteers, dancers, photographers and craftspeople who inhabit the building today, the Fine Arts Building is buzzing with more than a century of Chicago creativity and innovation. A Chicago Landmark since 1978, the building features original manually-operated elevators, Art Nouveau murals from the late 19th century and the recently renovated Studebaker Theater, one of the city’s most historic performance venues. The Studebaker has been graced by performances from luminaries such as Bob Hope, Peter O’Toole, Mae West, Ethel Barrymore, Geraldine Page, Vincent Price, and many more. Today, it hosts performances of musicals, opera, puppetry, comedy, dance and more from a wide variety of organizations. Since its curtain first rose, the Studebaker Theater has been recognized as an architectural gem and one of the most important live theatrical venues in Chicago. For more information, visit fineartsbuilding.com.
Manual Cinema is an Emmy Award-winning performance collective, design studio, and film/video production company founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller and Kyle Vegter. Manual Cinema combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive stories for stage and screen. Using vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and a live music ensemble, Manual Cinema transforms the experience of attending the cinema and imbues it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality. The company was awarded an Emmy in 2017 for “The Forger,” a video created for The New York Times, and named Chicago Artists of the Year in 2018 by the Chicago Tribune. In 2020 they were included in 50 of Chicago theater’s "Rising Stars and Storefront Stalwarts" (Newcity). Their shadow puppet animations were featured in the 2021 film remake of Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta and produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. In 2022 they premiered Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About A Terrible Monster, an adaptation of two books by celebrated children’s author Mo Willems, and a live adaptation of their 2020 streaming hit A Christmas Carol. In 2023, Manual Cinema completed production on their first self-produced short film, Future Feeling, and toured with folk rock band Iron & Wine the following year. This summer Manual Cinema premiered their latest feature production, The 4th Witch—a bold and imaginative inversion of Macbeth that is touring nationally this fall.